So, there WILL be some spice here, but like... dash of hot sauce level. A HINT of heat... A smattering of scorc- OK, I'll stop.
I do not own Arcane or League of Legends. This is purely fan work. Please, feel free to comment, criticize, and above all, enjoy!
The Fractured Reunion - Chapter 6 - Make-Up
Caitlyn paced back and forth, back and forth, before the door.
"Cait, you're going to wear a hole in the floor if you keep that up."
Maddie made a grasping motion with her offered hand, and Caitlyn acquiesced, sitting next to her on the hospital bench. Her hands didn't seek the ginger's, instead fidgeting against each other nervously. Guiltily.
"Madeline, I-I'm sorry, but I have to-" Caitlyn tried to begin. To explain. To apologize. But Maddie's hand settled, comfortingly, over her own. A sad but understanding smile blossomed over her lips.
"Caitlyn, from how you first talked about her, how she reacted when she heard how you'd talked about her... how WELL you both worked together in the field, her 'needing a minute' with you..."
Caitlyn blushed at how utterly obvious the two of them had apparently been.
"...How you lied about what happened to her in the tunnels with Jinx... how you SCREAMED when we all thought she'd been killed in that explosion... and I know it wasn't ME you saw in bed the morning everything started changing."
More and more and endlessly more Caitlyn needed to apologize for. But Maddie cupped a hand against her cheek, forestalled anything that might come forth. Though her next breath still shook with emotion, tears building at the bottoms of her eyes.
"I always knew... who really had your heart, I just... I hope I was-"
"You were MORE than- than ANYTHING, ANYONE, that I needed or deserved, Madeline. Especially given who I was at the time..." Caitlyn hurriedly assured her. Maddie scoffed at that. Not at Caitlyn's affirmation, or at her assertion of her own wrongs.
"I don't know how much I really helped at keeping you honest and righteous, Cait." She offered sadly. And it was the terrible truth. Maddie had wrapped herself around Caitlyn, affirmed every night or morning that they were, that SHE was, doing the right thing, for as much as she doubted Ambessa. Caitlyn, still too blinded by hate, by necessity, by responsibility, by grief to care about the harm she had been inflicting; Maddie, still too ignorant of the reality, still too steeped in a lifetime of prejudice and propaganda, to know otherwise. It had taken far too long for either of them to see the truth of what they'd done. But they at least had seen it.
So many now had decried Caitlyn's actions on Progress Bridge. Her decision to lift the blockade, to stand down all further operations, to arrest the Noxian forces. Piltover was, she knew, going to come apart at the seams. And as selfish as she'd been when wielding her power and crushing her heeled boot down on Zaun, she was being perhaps just as selfish now. By just worrying outside a hospital room while her city prepared to violently tear itself in two over daring to treat those deemed lesser as human for the first time in its history.
Only that wasn't quite right, she thought. Jayce had told her of the independence vote. The motion to admit their wrongs, to give Zaun exactly what it wanted, what it DESERVED, had passed unanimously. Even if Jinx's rocket had killed it in the cradle of implementation. She thought of how many on the barricade, even before her order, seemed that they might refuse to shoot when faced with the true HUMANITY of Zaun. Maybe-
"Ma'am, miss, you shouldn't- MISS! MISS!"
It was not the voice she'd longed to hear, but it WAS the trouble she frankly expected that finally started emitting from Vi's room.
"Sounds like our queue." Steb offered from the next bench over, smirking.
"All your fancy, Piltie shit and you don't even know how to put a line in-!"
Caitlyn started as she saw Vi rip the IV out of her leg and start poking fruitlessly at her biomagichenical arms. Then watched her face twist as pain began to set back in, and the needle refused to do her any good no matter where she stuck it.
"Miss," the doctor groaned, yanking the needle from her grasp and pressing it back into her thigh. "As far as we can tell, you don't HAVE functioning veins in your arms."
Vi looked, at those strange, frightening, wonderous limbs, and took a very deep, very embarrassed breath.
"...Ok, yeah, that tracks..."
Vi's gaze drifted, both brightening and hollowing as the team drew closer. It had been downright uncanny, how quickly and easily she'd ingratiated herself with them all those months ago. How truly, personally sad they'd all been when Caitlyn had told them Vi had died fighting Jinx, unwilling to admit to them why she had returned alone.
"Janna's Breath, you all look worse than me!"
Vi chuckled out, and the mood softened. Steb had needed prosthetics for both his lost arms, and Maddie was still a bit unsteady on her own new leg. Loris himself still groused that Caitlyn must've put his shoulder back into place wrong, but she was pretty sure he was just teasing after weeks of the same smirking complaint. Caitlyn had come out of it all the least scarred. Physically, at least. Emotionally...
"Oh! Commander Kiramman, I'm so sorry, I didn't-" the doctor began to babble. Babble in fear. Of HER.
"Please. Don't..." It took Caitlyn a few seconds of uncomfortable silence to realize she'd said that out loud.
Their eyes settled on each other. The burning, glowing Hextech Blue still seemed so ALIEN in her face. The scars too, were different, but they seemed more to fit her. Caitlyn startled slightly as she saw what looked like a chemical burn on much of Vi's right cheek, much of it likewise covered by a new tattoo: a wolf's head, set above two of the same battle gauntlets she'd worn and removed to start the protest on Progress Bridge.
"Doc, guys... give us the room?" Vi's plea cut through the tension, everyone given permission by her request to leave them. Maddie reached and their hands lingered, but she let go and followed the others swiftly. Caitlyn turned to see a look of curioisty and... Oh, no. Vi had a look of smug teasing on her face.
"So, you and Nolen, huh?" Vi raised an eyebrow comically high.
"That's- we- you- how did you KNOW?!"
Caitlyn slapped a hand over her mouth, partly to cover her accidental scream of embarrassment, partly to hide her blushing face. Vi's face grew far less mirthful.
"Cause I've been in love with you, too, Cupcake. And I knew I couldn't have you, too. I know the look..."
"Vi-"
The woman's hand shot up, forestalling any apology.
"I don't blame you. Really. I'm... I'm glad you weren't... alone, all this time. And, c'mon, it's fucking Maddie Nolen. She's like... public danger levels of cute. Oughta need a license to be able to leave the house."
The two of them, impossibly, descended into laughter and giggles.
"Heh, and-hah-shit... And, I... I wouldn't have a leg to stand on to be angry about it, anyway..."
The mirth dropped dead, and Vi could clearly see the confusion on her face.
"...Cait, the only reason I didn't have a working girl in my bed that I'd have had to kick out when I dragged you back to my place, was because I'd punched out a few too many fake you's the week before. Couldn't even afford Babette's Friends and Family Rate..."
Being reminded of the awful state Caitlyn had reduced her to... She approached Vi's beside and kneeled before her, taking one of the brawler's hands in both of hers, holding it close. Wherever these had come from... they FELT more alien than Vi's new eyes LOOKED, but they somehow also felt JUST the same as they always had. The contours and callouses and prints were entirely different, but also somehow exactly as her own hands desperately remembered.
"I could tell you, every second of every day for the rest of my life, how terribly, truly sorry I am." Tears were already spilling down her cheeks. She couldn't bring herself to look at anything but the hand she held. "For everything I did to you. To your people, to your home. I could say it past the day I die, and it still wouldn't be enough!"
"I know. I felt just the same."
Caitlyn's gasping sobs cut out as Vi's other hand traced against her cheek, tried to turn her head up, and stopped when she refused to let it lift. WHAT?
"Cait, did you think I told you how and why I abandoned Powder for shits and giggles? I did JUST what you did. Someone I loved hurt me, so I hurt them back. I know what that is to feel, to do..."
Caitlyn let the free hand tilt her head up, let herself see the pain and love and understanding and HOPE in Vi's face. See the tears of hurt and healing building in her eyes.
"And, I know what I wanted, more than anything, for 7 years while I was locked in Stillwater with nothing but my pain and what I'd done for company. I wanted to apologize. To see if Powder could ever find it in herself to forgive me for how I'd hurt her. To know if there was a chance or not, to fix what I'd broken between us..."
Vi's face started to draw closer. Closer. So impossibly, tantalizingly closer, closer even than her dreams.
"You've already apologized. You've already started fixing. So let me..."
A hesitation overcame her. Stopped her just short. It overcame the both of them. Caitlyn cursed herself. Nod. Lean in. Kiss her. Throw herself over the woman she loved and PROVE how MUCH SHE - DO! SOMETHIN-
Vi's lips pressed against the very edge of her mouth, her eyes slid closed but the Arcane power still lightly shone through. Her hands traced and caressed at Caitlyn's face before her eyes opened again as she pulled back, tears in danger of flowing down her cheeks.
"Sorry, just... had to make sure. It's our first kiss. Want it to really be real." She said softly. Breathlessly.
"Vi, we... we already-"
Vi shook her head, vigorously.
"No, that... that wasn't us. That was what we'd let ourselves be reduced to. You, drowning in anger and grief and guilt. Me, so damn afraid of losing you and trying to convince myself I'd lost my sister because of it, I let myself get twisted into everything I hate. We were walking, living lies, trying to convince ourselves we were the same people we'd been. That we'd fallen for. That wasn't honest. That wasn't us."
Vi's face leaned in again, capturing Caitlyn's lips against hers. They could taste each other's tears in their mouths, on their tongues. Of guilt and sorrow and joy and forgiveness and LOVE.
"This," Vi gasped out as they broke apart, each gasping for air. Gasping for each other. "This is us."
Vi reached down and pulled as Caitlyn hopped, both women working to get her up into the hospital bed, heedless of any possible danger to Vi as Caitlyn's foot snagged the IV and dragged the stand too far over, neither hearing the metal clattering over the blood rushing through them.
The doctor started towards the door at the sound of clattering and beeping, but Steb reached out a metal hand and stopped him cold.
"I'm not saying they both haven't made a lot of progress as people, but if you interrupt them right now, I'm fairly sure they'll kill you." He said matter-of-factly.
The doctor blanched and sat back down, while Steb tried to pretend what he could hear from behind the door had drowned out Maddie's sniffle. He sighed and stood up, started to walk.
"Where you going?" Loris asked.
"They're going to be loud enough soon that even your shaved monkey ears will hear more than you're comfortable with. I'm sure as the Void not sticking aroun-"
Maddie burst up out of her seat and sprinted down the hall, heading for the stairs. Loris gave Steb his usual grim, disappointed grimace.
"Well done." The large man grumbled at him before heading after her.
This was why Steb tried not to say much. He had a habit of always saying the wrong, if true, thing.
Caitlyn and Vi laid back against each other, breaths coming in desperate, but quite satisfied, pants. Vi realized they were ABSOLUTELY gonna have to eventually cross the bridge of why Caitlyn licking up her blood, even accidentally, had gotten her so fucking RILED. Some of her stitches had popped open from stretching farther than was medically sound, but neither woman could find the energy to truly care just yet. Vi was holding the wound mostly closed with a small Arcane barrier, anyway.
"Did you... were we... floating at the end there? Can you just...fly now?"
Caitlyn's soft, disbelieving, exhausted, loving voice was music, a balm to her very soul.
"...Fuck, I don't know... Void, is it dumb if I really hope so? Can you imagine me just... magically flying?"
The two fell into bright, breathless laughter. It was a mad, beautiful image in both their heads. Caitlyn laid her head against Vi's chest, and startled. She'd apparently missed it during all the fun: the extending web of crystal, gold, and prosthesis that extended from Vi's arms, over her collarbones and into the center of her chest. Caitlyn turned to look at her, face to face. She didn't even need to say anything.
"Yeah, I guess I owe you an explanation, don't I?"
Loris is the unwilling-but-willing emotional support bear man for the whole of the Enforcers. Why else do you think he drinks as much as Vi?
To all of you hoping for hot, steamy, explicit make-up sex... I'd say sorry, but that would imply I actually felt guilty. If there's one thing I've learned about my own tastes in writing and reading in the past week, it's that I think I find explicit sexual content (at least how most fanfic writers handle it) almost counterproductive to the project of depicting emotional intimacy, as paradoxical as I know that sounds/is. Just, going from expertly-written scenes of emotional drama and forgiveness or hate, of which there is a great variety of ways and means to depict; to the same samey descriptions of fingering and f*cking and whathaveyou... I totally get WHY it's used as it is; I guess it's just not what I'm looking for, nor what I personally want to write.
Like, I don't know, running fingers through hair, gasping each other's names, kissing at parts tenderly... I GET fundamentally why, I think it's just a lack of variety in how most are willing to describe and depict the act itself, and I just didn't feel like bothering with ground so ferociously well-tread. Hell, that ground's not even merely tread; it's CHURNED. It's BUTTER. LoL is almost 2 decades old and people have been shipping CaitVi for about as long as they've existed as characters, with Riot's encouragement. Arcane just brought them to a much wider audience.
But THIS as a overall story beat, almost more than the Bridge Protest, is the emotional, thematic culmination I realized I could build to after the Bridge Protest as I dabbled at Chapter 2, as I realized I could Connect Those Dots. When I started on a lark/emotional hunch writing Vi as wanting to forgive Caitlyn because she UNDERSTANDS BETTER THAN ANYONE, HAVING DONE JUST THAT HERSELF. But she's not emotionally there just yet, especially given everything ELSE Caitlyn did as Grand Commander. But Vi's there NOW. Vi forgives Caitlyn, cause she HAS DONE EXACTLY what Caitlyn did to her, and she gives Caitlyn what she hoped that she could get from her own victim.
Audioscape tip #2: pop on Samuel Kim's rendition of What Could've Been, then TRY to tell me it does not make a great, emotional make-up sex montage backing song.
'OH, this is actually PERFECT tonally and on a meta-level... Huh, I'm NOT interested in... writing the actual sex past the first kiss and the afterglow, work in that bit about the blood-licking though, that's GOLD, JERRY. GOLD... Oh, and then Maddie runs into a bathroom and cranks the sink or shower to cover her sobs on one of the chorus or transition sections. Oh, no, that's SO MEAN. UNNECESSARILY MEAN, she doesn't deserve that... No, STEB sets it off, not Loris! THIS SORTA SHIT is why he never talks! He just constantly puts his foot in it!'
...LOOK upon my madness, ye readership, and REJOICE!!! My buffer of the Post-S2-Act1 Creative Frenzy is also officially tapped out as of this chapter, so further updates will be far less speedy by comparison. Probably.